


Minific Madness

by Snapjack



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Firefly, Lethal Weapon (Movies), Parks and Recreation, Stranger Things (TV 2016), The Office (US), Zootopia (2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-07-16 05:56:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16079855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snapjack/pseuds/Snapjack
Summary: Minifics written for a dizzying variety of fandoms, including: Zootopia, Stranger Things, The Office (US), Parks and Recreation, Firefly, Lethal Weapon (the movies), and Discworld.





	1. Zootopia

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to JenTheSweetie, without whom none of these minifics would exist. Our 20-minute timed writing exercises are where most of these were born; the fact that our writing exercises tend to be 20 minutes long explain their length. Prompts are JenTheSweetie's, ideas for fandom and fulfillment tend to be mine.

Zootopia

 

 

  
Frankly, Judy doesn’t notice it until it bludgeons her over the head. She’s resting on her bed, chewing through a fairly disappointing turnip and mainlining Netflix when she stumbles across “Robin Hood”. The old version, with Brian Bedford as Robin and Monica Evans as Marian. Judy hasn’t seen it since she was a kid, and even then her parents weren’t too happy about letting her see it, though they made all the right noises about tolerance and how good foxes were at entertaining, it was nice they had that avenue to make money, though God knows how many tranquilizers the movie studios needed to keep on hand to keep them docile…

 

Her parents were actually sorta kinda _really prejudiced_ , Judy’s coming to realize, and with that she looks down and notices that she’s actually gnawing on the turnip _stem_. With a noise of disgust, she stretches to fling it away and that’s when she hears the line: "Remember me? We were kids together. Will you marry me?" 

 

Judy chokes on her own spit and nearly falls off the bed. She comes up coughing, eyes streaming, whacking herself hard in the chest to try to swallow the realization she’s just cottoned to: _she’s in love with Nick. Holy **shit**. She’s in so much trouble now. _

Because she is Judy, she decides to try to deal with the realization by running away from it. 

 

No, literally. As in, she straps on her Reeboks and she goes for a  _run_ , outside, in the cool night air. 

 

This is where some of her best thinking gets done, late at night--really, early in the morning--when Zootopia is at its quietest. It's never really  **quiet** \--there are always food truck deliveries and seagulls and night construction--but in the cool pre-dawn hours, she can pretend like she's back in the fields of home, like the sidewalks are rows that stretch out forever, like the horizon is just a suggestion. Chewing on a problem or a stubbornly resistant investigation, Judy has looked up from her running before and realized she's gone all the way out to the outer suburbs, that she's past the public transit cutoff, that she doesn't even know where she is. Crucially, though, she always gets back with an answer, with clarity, with purpose, with--

 

"LOOKOUT!" 

 

Judy goes tumbling ass over teakettle in a tumble of limbs and earbud cord and Nick and--wait. 

 

_"Nick?!??"_

 

He's getting up, shaking dust out of his fur, reaching for her elbows. "Are you alright?" 

 

Jesus. She hasn't even made it to the end of her block before running smack dab into the problem she was trying to run away from. "I'm fine," she says, a little snappier than she intends to. Then, softer, "I'm fine." His eyes are--well, they're  _Nick's_ , and he smells better than she had even remembered. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

 

"Came to see you," he says. 

 

Judy blinks. "At three in the morning?" 

 

"I know, I know, the jogging hour," says Nick. "What are you doing out?"

 

"I had a.... problem," Judy says lamely, and notices with a little swell of--something--how even before she reaches the end of the word "problem", his sharp black-rimmed ears have swiveled forward to full alertness. 

 

"Problem, where, what's the problem? How can I help?"

 

"No," says Judy, "It's ok. Not a bad problem. Just something I needed to work out. It's not important. What were you coming by for, anyway?"

 

Nick looks sheepish. "Couldn't sleep?" He hoists a plastic bag, dropped in the collision. Judy sees the outline of a couple pints of gelato. "One pint lavender turnip, one pint tumeric egg yolk?" 

 

Her stomach flips. "Sure." 

 

They start walking, slowly, towards her apartment. Nick's acting weird--every time her fur brushes his elbow, he shies away, but then he comes right back, invading her space a little. It's nice. He's wearing one of his nice shirts, too--chambray cotton, in a chocolate color that sets off his eyes. Judy is suddenly very aware of how sweaty and disheveled she must look. 

 

"Look, Nick--"

 

"--Judy--"

 

"No, you go first."

 

"No, you."

 

"Um, I've been thinking, and I'm not sure if I'm just maybe misreading this, but I had a thought, and it was maybe a thought that I wasn't sure if you shared or not, which I'm pretty sure it couldn't be unless you're as crazy as me, which obviously you aren't, I mean who goes jogging at three A--"

 

His kiss interrupts her, soft and yet insistent all at the same time, his arms coming up to cage her sweaty body between himself and the brick wall of her apartment building, her body relaxing and melting into his as he deepens the kiss, nips at her once, twice, then lets her go, his eyes searching hers as he pulls away. 

 

" _You_ go jogging at three A.M.," he says. "I  _know_ you." 

 

 


	2. Stranger Things

Stranger Things

 

The first time he meets Joyce Byers, it’s like a sparkler gets lit off in his gut and his balls all at once. His partner, because he still had a partner at that point, wasn’t yet sheriff, doesn’t seem to notice Joyce, which Hop thinks is weird. If you had a woman that good-looking—that dark and shy and slim, with eyes like a startled doe and an ass like a teenage boy—if you had a woman _that_ good-looking working in _your_ Ace Hardware, wouldn’t you notice? The second time he meets Joyce Byers, he gives her his number. She calls him at home that night. As soon as she establishes she’s got the right number, she asks him the question that he remembers, nightly, for the next eight years.

“What took you so long to give me your number?”

Hop **feels** his pupils expand, that’s how flat she’s knocked him on his ass.

“Uh. I don’t really know,” he admits, lamely. Hearing the conversation die on him, realizing she’s not going to save him from himself if he can’t make this work, he locates some scrap of manhood lying dormant and says, “So, you wanna maybe meet up sometime?”

 

They are screwing in his truck by ten o’clock **that night**.

 

And ten Fridays in a row after that.  They don’t take it outside the truck, because it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. She’s got a two-year-old boy at home, small and frequently feverish, and Hop has his own complicated fuck-up-edness from everything that happened towards the end of Sara’s life, and thankfully Joyce gets it, gets the need to not (not now, maybe not ever) introduce another child into Hop’s life. When it comes to an end, sorta natural, there are no hard feelings on either part, and that’s new to Hop, too: an end without rawness.

 

What **really** knocks him on his ass is when, eight years later, they become friends.

 

 

 


	3. The Office (US)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: this is, and will remain, an unfinished work.

The Office (US)

 

On the plane over the Atlantic Ocean, he must fight the urge to pick up the Skyphone and call Scranton every five minutes. Often, his hand is already on the phone before he gets it under control. Besides, even if he did miraculously get the balls to dial, and if she did pick up, what could he possibly say?

 

“Hi. Please don’t marry him.”

 

“Hi. I am completely in love with you.”

 

“Hi. I am begging you not to do this thing.”

 

“Hi. I’m calling from protective custody and there’s a flight marshal here who would like to speak to you about my mental health, and also bail.”

 

Not good. He can’t go down that path. If he calls her once, he’s going to call her a thousand times, and that way madness lies. So, no phone calls. He has not brought a cell phone and he will not use pay phones and if his mother doesn’t like the thought of him all alone in a foreign country without a phone, well, that’s just tough. He can’t go through life waiting for a call that isn’t coming.

 

Jim’s plan, such as it is, is to start in France and work his way westward, backpacking towards Italy, eating whatever requires the least planning and sleeping in places that don’t need reservations. He doesn’t know if such places exist in Europe. He has never been outside of the United States. He may end up sleeping under a tree. Right now, that option is sounding all right to Jim. He has always been well cared for, fed, loved by his family and told frequently that he was valued and special. Now, he is thinking about sleeping in mud, getting shitfaced every night, and pissing against every four-hundred-year-old wall from Paris to Sicily. He closes his eyes, wedges his shoulders deep into the blue pleather seat, jams his earbuds deep in his ears and closes his eyes for a good long sixteen-hour fume.

 

Because, after all, isn’t he entitled to fume?  He threw himself at a girl, just hurled himself headlong at her, and she stepped back just fast enough to yank his heart out with her bare hands as he fell past her. No.  Wait. That’s not fair to Pam. Pam doesn’t have blood on her hands, not those dainty clean neat white little infuriating hands. Pam just stepped back and let her engagement do the bloody work. Just said, “I can’t,” not “I won’t,” or “I choose differently,” or even “I don’t want you.” Just, “I can’t”. Because, see, she’d already hired a fucking caterer, and those engagement presents are so hard to return, and Roy would be **_so mad_** , so what’s a girl to do? Jim snarls at the imaginary Pam in front of him, and his seatmates both share a panicked glance, which Jim doesn’t see because his eyes are closed and he is deep in imaginary confrontation with a girl with neat white perfect hands.

 

A confrontation with kissing. Jim had been frowning, but at the memory of that kiss, his entire face softens; his mouth twitches as he remembers the way she delicately threaded those neat little hands through his hair to draw him closer. His shoulders slump and he cuddles himself deeper into the airline seat, squinching his eyes shut and willing the memory closer; but there is something about it which disappears even as he tries to burn it into his mind, it is fading like the afterimage of a glance at the sun. Soon there will only be green and purple splotches of color and memory left; and after those fade, he will be in total darkness. He is afraid of what he might do then, when he can no longer remember the way she tasted or the tiny noises of her breathing. He is afraid and he is also looking forward to it. Oblivion could only be better than this.

 

He is wrong. Oblivion, in the form of a drugged sleep on the plane, is much, much worse. Because here, in a stupor he induced with two Dramamine and a scotch on the rocks, there is nowhere to hide from the Pam that only exists in his head. The Pam who is brave, the Pam who shows up at his door, announces simply, “I broke up with Roy,” steps inside and shucks off her clothes matter-of-factly, then plants her hand on his chest and pushes him ass-over-teakettle onto the couch, following him with her lips and her arms and oh God her legs and her kisses.... this Pam isn’t real. This Pam, who is busy pushing herself up his body kissing every spot she hovers over, could not be real. Pam is not this brave. Pam is not this bold. Pam would not do that thing where she scrapes her teeth against his skin with every open-mouthed wet sloppy kiss, so every kiss has a tiny bite in the center of it, making him jump and gasp. No, this Pam, brave assertive hungry carnal Pam, is definitely not real. She sure feels real.  Jim starts awake, horrifyingly aware that he is on a plane and that he has been having a dream which, in all likelihood… yep. That’s just great. He’s sitting in an airplane, wedged between two strangers, with a raging hard-on for a girl who only exists in his mind. Thank God he put the tray table down before he went to sleep. His empty scotch sits on the tray in its plastic cup, the ice cubes almost melted away, and as he raises it to his mouth and swallows the diluted last traces of scotch, Pam’s voice comes back to him, talking about “second drinks”, and he nearly chokes on it.

 

Paris is not a good place to get over a girl who paints. After the third time he finds himself standing in front of an art supply shop, trying not to cry or vomit, he decides he has to leave. He had planned to stay in the city for seven days. He doesn’t make it seven hours.

 

The countryside is better, marginally. The towns are much closer together than he’d realized. Every morning, he buys some fruit at the local grocery and walks down the road towards the next town, shedding orange peel or spitting out grape seeds as he goes. Once, he gets brave enough to try a pomegranate, and arrives at the next town with his hands and face stained bright pink from the juice. This marks the first time a Frenchwoman notices him—a young mother out for a stroll with her toddler. When she laughs at Jim and says something gently teasing, he looks so pitifully startled that she feels immediately sorry for having laughed, and motions for him to wait while she pulls a baby wipe out of her purse.  She offers it to him and he takes it and cleans up, and she says something to him again which he doesn’t understand, but he says “Merci,” and that seems to make something clear to her, because she smiles and waves goodbye, and pushes her stroller on down the street, looking back at him once or twice. He does not look back.

 

At night, he lies on his back in hostels with torn windowshades and peeling paint, and in his dreams he is under Pam, tasting her, fucking her, endlessly ridden by her in a torturous imitation of reality. He never gets quite far enough under the surface of sleep to forget that he is dreaming; instead, he watches her ride him all night with complete awareness that this is not real; that she is not here. In his dreams, Pam wears white silk panties and a blue silk bra, and when he peels her out of them and slides into her, the spot where their bodies join is blurred, like a floater in his vision—no matter how much he wants to look, he can never quite see it. Her hair is a nimbus of light—sometimes, as though she is underwater, it floats upwards in a rippling effect, and glows like a campfire, bathing her in sunshine. 

 

In the daylight, his eyes hurt. This is partly due to hangover and partly due to the crying. He has never cried so much in his life, and it is actually hurting his eyelids, a part of the body he never knew could hurt till now. He is starting to wonder if the old cliché about “crying till my eyes bleed” is real, and if it will happen to him, because he’s damn sure that if it’s biologically possible, he’s nearing that threshold. He buys a pair of cheap sunglasses and stays on the shadier side of all available streets.

 

In the dreams, she is trying to tell him something; her mouth is moving, but he can’t make out what she’s saying, and again and again he begs her to repeat herself, but she only laughs and again mouths words he can’t hear. He wakes up with an aching hard-on and a heart too low to do anything about it. He has considered hiring a prostitute, but the only thing he can imagine more depressing than being without Pam, is being with someone who is not Pam. Besides, it’s unlikely any self-respecting prostitute would go near him at this point; he looks wild. His eyes are red and his hair hasn’t lain down for days; he jumps at every unexpected noise and knocks over any water glass he goes near. His beard is coming in, and people are beginning to give him a wide berth on sidewalks. That’s fine by him. He finds himself drawn to war memorials and cemeteries, partly because of the quiet, but mainly—and this is horrible to admit but it’s true—because no one looks at you strangely if you’re standing in the middle of a cemetery with tears rolling down your face.

 

When it starts to rain on day ten, he is unprepared and gets soaked to the bone on a country road before someone pulls over and gives him a ride to the next town with a hotel. In the car, he starts to notice that he doesn’t feel so good—aside from the ever-present crippling depression, there’s a strange high whining in his ears—and when he gets to the hotel, standing up feels swimmy. The hotel is a Best Western, which he didn’t realize they had in France, but apparently they do, and he is just coherent enough to hand over his credit card before the fever hits him like a hammer and down he goes, out for three straight days with the most vicious flu he’s ever experienced. His room is stuffy and overheated, his sheets are a mangled swamp of fever sweat, and the hotel staff treat him like he’s got the plague, which in a way he supposes he does. He cannot stand up straight and nearly faints whenever he tries to, and the dehydration sends a crippling sheet of pain through his brain whenever he opens his eyes. He has an impression of being seen by a French doctor, but is unsure if this is a hallucination. (It’s not; the hotel staff called for an emergency medical consult three hours after Jim checked in, when a maid going by in the hallway saw him passed out face-down on his bed, still fully dressed in sopping wet clothes, with the door wide open and the key hanging out of the lock.) He is only briefly conscious between dreams, and in those minutes he is freezing and then boiling, and he says her name miserably into the dark because she is the only person he could want to see.

 

Italy is better, if only because the weather is warming as June develops, and he can spend more time outside, away from people. The flu, when it finally receded, left him with a slight lightheadedness that he is beginning to suspect will be permanent. (He is actually correct about the permanence of the injury—the infection has scarred his Eustachian tubes—but he will not feel the damage forever. Eventually his brain will learn to ignore the faintly off-kilter signal his ears are sending,) Right now, though, the lightheadedness feels good; it’s like being drunk without the expense or embarrassment.


	4. Parks and Recreation

Parks and Recreation

You never expect to wake up in Indiana, but one day Illinois decides they don’t need auditors anymore and Missouri just can’t afford them, so you take a call from your old buddy Chris, who’s been balancing books in Indianapolis for a few years now, and the work sounds boring but then again, you like eating. So you take the job, and the job takes you to Snerling and Gary and South Irvine, every single one of which manage to be somehow more depressing than their names imply.  You get used to hotel rooms that have one light bulb, hotel rooms where the door to the bathroom has been kicked in so many time it no longer closes, hotel rooms that smell like baked sweat. You get used to local Indiana television, to grainily filmed high school basketball games and the endless reruns of “Hoosiers”. You swallow your misgivings and give in to the pressure to try the local pork tenderloin sandwich; the sugar cream pie; the French Toast burger. You learn how to say “there is a smell in my room” in a couple of different languages. You think you have a crush on the Channel 13 weathergirl. And then you get sent to Pawnee, and the local food is called, no shit, a Paunch Burger, and the raccoon problem is genuinely concerning, and your hotel room doesn’t have so much a smell as a **haunting** , but none of that matters, because there is this woman. And she is **amazing**.


	5. Firefly

Firefly

 

When it finally happens, it is very late on Serenity; the rest of the crew are fast asleep, except for River, who has the conn from midnight to six. It didn’t matter; Mal reckons you didn’t need to be no reader to hear them. And the first time they kissed, hell, he nearly fainted.

 

They’d been talking all night, sitting up against the bulkheads with their legs stretched out, talking softly so’s not to wake the others about times past, childhoods and such. It was such a strange spell to be under, not fightin’ with each other for once, that neither of them wanted to stir lest they break it—Mal’s ass was asleep and his legs were cold and tingling, but he didn’t hardly dare stand, lest their magic spell come crashing down around them. But he could barely keep his eyes open, and Inara kept yawnin’, and finally they couldn’t ignore it no more.

“Inara,” said Mal. “We’re getting’ old.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Inara, smiling. “I’m still young and spry as I ever was.”

Mal looked up at the curving arches of the bulkheads, so familiar, so loved. Sometimes it seemed he’d been lookin’ at ‘em his whole life, even though Serenity and him had only been sharing space about twelve years.

“You ever think about a different life?” he murmured, hoping that the softness of his tone would keep Inara close just a little longer, stave off the inevitable bedtime. He felt like he’d had too much to drink, even though all they’d shared was tea.

“Mmmm. Sometimes,” Inara said. “I wonder if I’d stayed at the Academy, trained more companions. Wonder if I’d never met you. What my life would be like.” Her head was padded on Mal’s shoulder, her knees drawn up under her like a child, and her fingers kept playing with a loose thread at the cuff of Mal’s sleeve; she ran it through her fingers gently again and again, and the stray thought occurred to Mal that he hoped the thread wouldn’t break, so she’d keep on having an excuse to do it. He shifted, just a little, careful not to move his sleeve or his shoulder, so his lips were brushing the crown of her head.

“Now there’s a chillin’ thought,” he said, and felt her answering giggle bubble up from inside her, moving the softness of her hair against his mouth. Such a tiny thing, to be so moved by it. He felt sorta like coming apart at the seams, and as the quiet passed in the tiny compartment, and Inara’s breathing slowly became even and steady, and her head heavier on his shoulder, he decided to go ahead and let himself dissolve, just this once.  Just for this night. He let his head sag back against the bulkhead, tellin’ himself, _We’ll fall asleep like this, I’ll wake up with a crick in my neck and she’ll be gone, or she’ll wake up and shoo me out of here, but either way we won’t wake up together._

“Inara,” he said, his eyes drifting shut. “’Nara.”

And opened his eyes as the head on his shoulder shifted away decisively in response. Inara was looking at him, and in her eyes there was something new. Odd.

“Mal,” she said, and looked—deliberately—slowly—at his mouth. Then back to his eyes again. A question in her gaze that even he could read.

Mal licked his lips. Hesitated. Leaned in, slowly, hesitatin’ the whole way, giving her plenty of chances to spook. Givin’ himself the same chance, he had to admit. Her little hands were wrapped around his lapels, her eyes wide and frightened as a deer’s, and his heart was poundin’ a million miles a minute, and when their lips first touched he thought he was gonna die, thought Serenity was gonna come apart right there, just to show him what happened when he got too close to somethin’ perfect.

 

But Serenity didn’t come apart, she just kept on humming, a healthy steady throb like the pulse of an ocean against its shore, as Inara’s little mouth, sticky with red gloss, explored his, tentative and careful and so so so delicate. He didn’t want to hurt her or scare her but God, he wanted to wrap her up and lay her down, make a bed for her of his arms and a shelter for her of his body, all those old-fashioned notions havin’ to do with warmth and safety and a man’s calling to provide all those things for a woman. Mal had a naggin’ inkling that Inara might punch him in the kidney if he said any of this aloud, so he concentrated instead on kissing her, just as gently and as carefully as he knew how to, sinking his hands into her hair and doing what he’d always done: hanging on by the raggedy edge. Trying like hell to steer.


	6. Lethal Weapon (movies)

Lethal Weapon (movies) 

 

Rianne’s dad thinks he taught her how to drive. In reality, it’s Martin who takes her aside at a family barbecue one Fourth of July.

“Rianne. Psst. Psst. Rianne. Rianne.”

“What, God, you’re worse than a—where are we going?”

Walking backwards, he tosses her the keys to—wait. These aren’t the keys to the station wagon. These are the keys to Martin’s truck. “Are we going on a beer run? Do you need me to drive? Are you drunk _already_ , Martin?”

“Do you always ask this many questions?” he says, and gets in the passenger side.

She climbs into the sun-warm, sweet smelling truck, so familiar, so full of Sam’s fur and McDonald’s wrappers and cigarette smoke. “Martin! You’re supposed to be quitting!”

“What, I’m cutting back. You want to learn to drive like not an old granddad or you want to lecture me on my lungs?”

“I want to learn to drive like not an old granddad.” 

“Good.” He sticks his long legs out and pulls his hat down over his eyes, crossing his arms like he’s planning on falling asleep. From under the brim: “Well, come on already. Start ‘er up.”

“Where are we _going_?” she says, starting the car and putting it, tentatively, in gear—the gearbox makes an awful sound and she’s glad she can’t see Martin wince under the hat.

“I ‘unno, drive us somewhere and we’ll see where we end up.”

 

She steers them, carefully, onto the highway—Martin dozes in the sunny passenger seat, unconcerned with where she’s taking them. She appreciates his trust, and also the freedom to ogle, since traffic’s slow. Martin always wears tight jeans and shirts that are washed to just the right degree of softness—Rianne’s got peripheral staring down to an art, and the view is especially fine today. When she finally pulls off the freeway and into the empty parking lot of a bowling alley / roller rink complex, Martin rouses and looks around: “OK, where we at. Oh, this is great. Just perfect. We’ll be able to teach you some real stuff here.”

 

He’s not kidding. Over the course of the next hour and forty-five minutes, he teaches her approximately thirty different ways to drive fast, and hazardously.

“Put the gas pedal down. All the way down. All the way! Nothing here to hit, go!”

“Now this, this you’re gonna wanna learn for when you wanna look cool in front of some guy. This is a handbrake turn. You ready?”

“You can’t learn to get out of a fishtail until you get into a fishtail.”

“Hey hey hey, breathe. Breathe. You’re learning this here so you don’t have to learn this on the 405.”

“The secret isn’t to not ever crash, it’s to crash smart.”

“If people are shooting at you, there isn’t a speed limit.”

“Oh, that? It’s just burning rubber. Ignore it. No, seriously. If I wanted to save my tires I’d fuckin’ let somebody else drive.”

 

Meanwhile he smokes and she chides him (and then bums a cigarette off him); a condom slides off of the dash and she pretends not to notice as he tucks it in his jeans pocket. They buy beer on the way back to the picnic and arrive right before the fireworks start. Rianne’s mom looks for a moment like she’s thinking about throwing a fit, but then Martin throws an arm around her shoulders and her whole face gentles. Standing there, he looks like a big gangling teenager. Rianne knows he’s not, knows he’s a whole grown man with a lot of biography behind him—but for a moment, as Rianne’s mom melts and fusses over him, as he winks at Rianne and walks away, as the first fireworks bloom across the sky—they’re exactly the same age.


	7. Discworld

Discworld 

 

The thing about dragons is that they **smell**. A diet of coal will do that to a creature, and no matter how much you muck out their stalls, there’s always this vague scent of brimstone and lye that hangs over the whole affair, like the leftover whiff at a crematorium. Vimes finds it damn unsettling, and he’s not generally easy to unsettle. (He has, for instance, watched Nobby Nobbs clean out his ear canals.) But Sybil loves the creatures, and she cares for them in the unfussy way that Vimes has learned is the hallmark of the truly, stupendously rich. (Imagine, if you will, two ladies. One wears a velvet smoking gown, diamonds, and pink powdered wig around the house. The other wears an old shooting jacket that was once her grandfather’s, with thick canvas trousers and green rubber Wellies. You might guess the former was the richer lady. You would be wrong, by several million quid.) There is nothing precious or sweet about Sybil’s love for her reeking, stinking, highly flammable creatures—Vimes has walking in on her yanking one by the halter and threatening to “knock the shit from its ancestors” if it didn’t behave—and that is precisely why he admires it. When everything else is burnt to ash, and nothing is pretty or handsome or prestigious about him anymore, he knows Sybil will still be there, with her sleeves rolled up and a look of determination on her face.   
  
It makes up for the smell.


End file.
